new American identities that confirm an Other in political, social and epistemic dimensions."( p. 61). Unlike Quijano, Gonzalez was not able to escape from the common-sense traps following that centuries-old racialization. In the following paragraph, he paints the American racial picture as a result of the European invasion and minimizes one of the colors of the palette: black. He excludes not only the South-African presence, almost as old as the European one, by reducing from three to two the continents involved in our post- Columbian history. He also leaves the inference to the reader by mentioning mulattos and zambos just in passing among the biological results of miscegenation. It goes more confusing through the repeated use of the category race, as if it could be plural in the human being, and furtherly affirms that such blood outcomes are precise and scientific, when they were created, imposed and socially perpetuated by conjunctural factors always in favor of the white people, who were designated so due to their social status and wealth. In other words, being a mulatto or zambo in colonial America was a matter of consensus and / or imposition in a social order crossed by inequalities that both the European and the Creole provoked around such ancestry, along with the dictum of nature. The explained reduction of three and a half centuries of African genocide— which others call slave trafficking or, worse, The Slave Route— and five centuries of Afro-Latin-American or Latin-Afro-American history would not be so incongruous with the alleged impropriety of including black color in our sociocultural palette. It has been the ungrateful hard currency given to Afrodescendants for both the cultural and the material benefits obtained from them by all possible means of violence. In the refractory narrative on the Afroculture by Gonzalez, it is more disturbing that he celebrates the arrival of " new European migratory flows and their associated ethnic groups from the 1870s(...) immigrants from the now far and near East, which will further diversify the Latin American melting pot "( p. 62). Without denying the quantitative importance of this immigration— in some countries, regions and times more than in others—, its contribution to the American musical mix is not proportional, but rather punctual and exceptional; therefore, irrelevant. However, the strangeness of such a reference is soon revealed, since it had no other motive than to prepare the ground for introducing one of the great thinkers on post-coloniality: the Palestinian Edward Said, who inaugurated this theory with his book Orientalism( 1978). Gonzalez could have sharpened his mind by citing Said rather than celebrating the migration of his continental fellows. Said’ s academic weight was enough to force the American musical reality into an obeisance to Asian immigrants. In weighing both the sub-Saharan and Eastern presences in America, we notice that the 100 million Africans— a conservative estimate— used as biological fuel to position Europe as the first world and trapped in their silence— are more relevant than a thinker with Americanist intentions. The Argentine historian Judith Farberman has specialized in popular religiosity with respect to the magic and sorcery in Santiago del Estero and Tucumán during the colonial era. She has published two books, one academic( 2005) and one( 2010) for dissemination, dealing with the Salamanca, the legendary venue of witches and demons. Her sources are overflowed with blacks and mulattoes, zambos and pardos( per the terminology by that time), especially females. But in her analysis, they seem to be a mere
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